So yeah.... I told you I would be back sooner than my previous 'every-three-months' schedule.
If you are following "It's a Tasha Thing", you already heard about our legal run in with DreamHost, the ISP in California who act as a virtual harbor for Intellectual Property thieves around the world.
Including a Scam Site running at www.the-realdoll.com that is attempting to dupe unsuspecting folks into meeting Polymerisians that don't exist. The scam included the use of photos of our own Tasha James.
If you think the look is fierce, you should have heard the language and seen the gesturing that ensued from her when she found out.
If you clicked over to DreamHost's web site, that term "Virtual Private Server" doesn't really mean 'Private' if you have the cheese to get a lawyer involved. We don't really have the cheese, but we do have a collective backbone and needed to send the message that Maddy G won't be fucked with.
So, we sent the budget for "Episode 105" of Tasha's show to the legal team and we shut down the-realdoll.com for mass Copyright infringement. Of course, the celebration only lasted 3 days, when the site came back online but without photos of Tasha.
It's a small victory, but we'll take it. The message was delivered.
In a strange twist of irony after my last blog post about Youtube, we've had a change in plans regarding our strategy there.
It turns out, the advertising revenue coming in from Youtube has exceeded the ad revenue from MaddyGTV so we've decided to adjust our course.
MaddyGTV has grown into a pretty popular destination for our friends and fans, which we're all very proud of. We're hovering around 500k viewers a month. The downside of this, is the bandwidth required to serve video to that size of an audience is expensive. Big, fast servers being monitored 24/7 to push almost 10TB of data every month. It's not exactly cheap.
The rub here, is that our programming is a double edged sword. It's weird enough to draw a sizable audience, but too weird to attract the advertisers we need to run it and continue to bring in new programming. We've struggled with finding and keeping sponsors since we launched the site almost 2 years ago now. And in that time, the channel has yet to break even, yet alone turn any kind of profit.
So, there's been some changes over at MaddyGTV. A good portion of the programming has been removed, leaving only our most popular shows. You'll also notice that we're leaning on Youtube more to serve the video files. This is both to reduce the amount of bandwidth being served and also to get our GoogleAds in front of more eye balls.
This thing we do, being in the business of making entertainment, is liquid and always moving. Just a few years ago, it was accepted that entertainment, in the form of movies, television and music, was something that people should pay for. Now it's understood by everyone, that entertainment is (or should be) free, and everyone's forgotten that shows don't make themselves, it requires the work of a dedicated cast, crew and a host of writers, technicians and music artists to bring these things to life. All these people have homes, and kids and bills to pay too.
I'm not bitching, I'm only explaining the facts of it. For us to be able to continue to produce programming and offer it for free, we have to pay attention to where the money is actually coming from. Maddy often says, "Sometimes you have to put on a short skirt and do a little dance for the sponsors."
Consider these changes our "Little Dance".
And speaking of dancing... if you still haven't installed the free Virtua-Girl software, you are missing Katie De Sys doing her little dance on your desktop.
She a long, slow drink of hot chocolate and for $2 she'll spend 30 minutes taking all her clothes off. And it's WORTH it. Again, sexy as hell, but NOT safe for work.
Enjoy the show. I'll be back with more news soon.
- Mark
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